Artists: Gao Weigang, Jin Shan, Wang Gongxin, Wang Ningde, Zhao Gang, Zhou Yilun. Venue: Platform China (HK)
Extending the excitement of Art Basel, Platform China organizes ‘Summer Heights – Group show” to showcase artists collaborating with the gallery including Gao Weigang, Jin Shan, Wang Gongxin, Wang Ningde, Zhao Gang, Zhou Yilun. Their unique treatments on various kinds of material reflect their personal experience and cognition of surroundings. The exhibition comprises a wide range of works including paintings, installation, mixed media and video, which aim to reveal the diversity and dynamic of Chinese contemporary art.
GAO Weigang (b.1978, Province, China) is a high yield artist with a variety of creative styles and techniques. His dark humor and manipulation of classical forms for contemporary aims are two essential elements in his creation. Some works see common objects reconfigured into enigmatic arrangements. His susceptibility for art language is always shown as his application of two cold materials: marble and metal. He extends his catholic tastes to many media capable of carrying his ambiguous and blurry conceptualism, such as painting and installation.
Jin Shan’s (b.1976, Zhejiang, China) creative works’ essence is based around writing, which is closely intertwined with the idea of a “narrative”. Using this method of “narrative”, the themes, which he is interested to discuss, mainly tie in with individual experience and contemporary history through the use of video, photography, sound, painting, and other media.
WANG Gongxin (b.1960) is an internationally recognized artist specializing in video and video installations. His practice centers on conceptions of reality and imagination as represented across cultural, economic and historical divides. Moving to New York City in 1987, Wang’s work contained a strong element of self-exploration, and his practice transformed further upon his return to China in the mid-1990s – which he took on a renewed perspective on China’s social and economic transformation. Based in Beijing, Wang is a guest professor in the New Media Art Department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing.
WANG Ningde (b.1972, Liaoning, China) graduated from Luxun Art Academy and have been transforming from a documentary photographer to an artist. Through exploring the concepts of temporality and memories, his practice investigates the properties of time, history and memories. He recently revisits the basic theories of photography and applies them into his recent works, which question critically on images authenticity and validity of the world that we conceived.
ZHAO Gang (b.1961, China) graduated from Vassar College in New York in 1984, and awarded master’s degree from Bard College in New York in 1998. Zhao Gang is a professional painter. Zhao’s experience of studying abroad and his local identity bring both capitalism and socialism ideologies in his works. There is no complex concept in his painting at all, he just tries to build up his own creative style by the power of “incompetent” ability.
ZHOU Yilun (b. 1983, Zhejiang, China) graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Central Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, he expresses a genuine and honest reaction to the superimposition of visual information his generation is subjugated to. Considering painting and making art as a playful activity, Zhou Yilun epitomizes a sense of disjunction from the traditional pictorial language and gives birth to compositions that are borne of a processing and analysis of visual information, so that it is returned with a different format. Zhou uses existing images and deprives them of their original function and meaning to adapt them to his own intentions and visual language. The action of choosing a particular image rather than another gives him the power of judgment, a personal value he is keen to pursue.
